Soul Salvation

As time wore on, Rania tried to put what little information she got from Michelle to good use in her search, but there was still not a whole lot to be found. Finals were upon her, and due to Brian’s protests, Rania devoted a good deal of her time to studying and schoolwork. But she still insisted on using the rest of her time to search for whatever information she could use to point her in the right direction.

“Have you thought of any way to find more information yet? Not that I want you to keep spending too much time on it,” Brian asked Rania one day as she sat out on the porch with a book.

“I’ve been thinking, actually,” Rania said as she looked up at him from her reading. “It’ll be tricky, but Michelle said she’d gotten a call directly from the coroner’s office. I wonder if I could somehow find out information from them, or the morgue in the hospital… give them the same story that I gave Michelle about doing research for a report. If they won’t help then I really don’t know what else to do.”

“That one might be a bit harder to manage. I feel a hospital would be rather guarded about patient information. Even if that patient was dead,” Brian replied, and Rania looked out into the vast yard lined with thick forest. Brian did have a point. It wasn’t going to be easy getting the information she needed, but she knew she had to try.

“So has your little ghostly pal come back to haunt you?” Sam playfully scoffed during lunch the next day. Rania chuckled along with her, but inside she didn’t find it all that funny. She really wanted for someone else to finally be able to see Brian. But at the same time she kind of liked the fact that she was the only one that could see Brian. It made her feel special, to have this secret that no one else really knew about.

“Actually I’ve been helping him try to cross over,” Rania explained, and the two girls looked at her skeptically.

“You’re… what?” Sam asked, head cocked to the side a little.

“Helping him cross over. You know… free his spirit or whatever. Move on to the afterlife instead of being stuck here as a ghost,” Rania further explained.

“Oh,” the two girls said in unison, slowly nodding their heads.

“So… if there really is a ghost-“

“There is,” Rania said, cutting Mariah off in mid-sentence.

“…then he’ll be gone for good?”

Rania slowly nodded, feeling a small sense of sadness come over her. She wanted Brian to move on, so he could be happy, but she’d be losing the closest friend she had. She enjoyed having Brian around to talk with all hours of the day. The idea of losing him made her suddenly sad.

“So how are you going to do that?” Mariah asked.

“I’m not sure, really. I figure maybe if I find out how he died, I’ll be able to help him more. But there’s nothing on the internet anywhere to help me, or in any old newspapers,” Rania said with a sigh. “I was gonna see if the hospital would have it on record.”

“My mom’s a nurse at the hospital,” Sam piped up. “I’m sure if we went to her she’d pull some strings. It’s not like it’s something ridiculously confidential.”

“I was thinking if we told them we needed the information for a school report on recent local history, it’d make it a bit easier. I can’t exactly go up to them and tell them the truth,” Rania said.

“Like I said. My mom can help us. We’ll go there after school.”

--------

“Hey mom!” Sam greeted as the three girls made their way to the nurses’ station.

“Sammy, what are you doing here?” her mother asked, though she was smiling and was genuinely happy to see her daughter.

“We were wondering if you could help us with something,” Sam began to explain, and she used the previously agreed story about the school report.

“Honey, I don’t know. That’s kind of an… odd request. I could get in trouble if I just handed over a previous patient’s file to you.”

“We don’t want the file. We just want to know how the guy died. You could go find it yourself, jot it down on a piece of paper, and bring that back to us. We need to know; nothing else states how the guy died. Please, mom?” Sam asked, grinning her biggest, brightest smile. Her mother sighed, and Rania looked at her with hopeful eyes.

“Alright. But you’ll have to wait till my next break,” her mother said, keeping her voice low as a doctor walked by. “But don’t ask me to do anything else. It’d be bad enough if I got caught with that file even in my hands. The only reason I’m agreeing is because I’ve done this before and didn’t get caught. You girls just go sit down over there and mind yourselves.”

Some time later, Rania sat with her two friends in some seats along the wall. Sam’s mother had already left her nurse station and she was anxiously waiting her to come back with any information at all.

“So your mom does sketchy things at work? All the time?” Mariah asked, looking at Sam.

“Not all the time. My mom is really good at lying though. She won’t get caught, and if she does she won’t get in trouble. She was just being overdramatic,” Sam replied, twiddling her thumbs back and forth.

After a few more moments, Sam’s mother returned to the desk, glancing up at Sam. The girl rose and approached her, talking quietly and taking a folded slip of white paper from her mother’s hand. As Sam made her way back over Rania could feel her heart pounding. This was it. She was finally going to know how Brian died.

“Here,” Sam said, her hand outstretched to Rania, who hurriedly took the paper and unfolded it.

Brian E. Haner Jr.
Cause of death: cracked skull; traumatic blood loss.
Patient found at bottom of stairs in home with fatal head wound. Dead on scene. No foul play suspected.

“So?” Mariah asked after a moment.

“It says he died of a head wound. His skull was cracked. They said they found him at the bottom of the stairs, so if he died there, it makes a lot of sense. Those stairs always gave me an unsettled feeling when I first moved there,” Rania explained.

“Do you think it’ll help?” Sam asked.

“Yes. But I have to go. Now. Brian will want to know.”

“Can we come? Please?” Mariah asked.

“Fine. But hurry up. I want to get there fast.”